In the current issue of National Review, Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru try to develop a respectable argument that President Obama is un-American. They dismiss the literal version that defines Birtherism. And they stipulate that the president and his allies want sincerely to improve the lives of their countrymen–no accusations of despotic conspiracies here. What Obama lacks, it seems, is a proper appreciation for our national creed. Lowry and Ponnuru dub this creed American exceptionalism: that view that United States has “a unique role and mission in the world: as a model of ordered liberty and self-government and as an exemplar of freedom and a vindicator of it, through persuasion when possible and force of arms when absolutely necessary.”
I have a lot of historical objections to the argument. Among other things, Lowry and Ponnuru rely much to heavily on the Reaganite holy trinity of Jefferson-Lincoln-Wilson at the expense of small-r republican and non-interventionist traditions. There’s also some curious, and apparently not playful, appropriation of theological language, as Matthew Lee Anderson observes. America is said to offer not only a economic system, but “an economic gospel”, as if our particular blend of public subsidy and private profit–which has existed at least since the internal improvements of the 1820s–were divinely ordained. But the most serious problem is conceptual. Lowry and Ponnuru don’t distinguish between two ideas, one of which can be called American exceptionalism, the other American exclusivism.
The exceptionalist can agree with the definition given above. As far as I can tell, Obama, almost all the influential figures in American politics, and most ordinary people do. But the exceptionalist also knows that the meaning of the ideals involved in America’s mission is open to interpretation–as in the Isaiah Berlin essay on which the title of this post is based. Further, he’s aware that they’re not the only ones worth pursuing.
Ordered liberty and self-government are important. But so are justice, peace, personal morality, and cultural excellence–areas in which America has not always been an inspiring model. From this point of view, there’s no contradiction between American exceptionalism and acknowledgment of the many ways in which America falls short, both of its own ideals and of those sometimes better represented by other nations. At the very least, it admits the possibility that we have something to learn from foreigners, even Europeans, who may be exceptional in their own ways.
American exclusivism, on the other hand, holds that the United States effectively represents and defends the only significant values, or at least the supreme ones. From this point of view, America is, as such, on the side of the angels. It can perhaps do wrong, but it can never be wrong.
This more extreme view is far from universal among our rulers and fellow citizens. What it is, as Lowry and Ponnuru admit, is the animating principle of the modern conservative movement. But do they really want to argue that movement conservatives have a monopoly of the American creed comparable to America’s monopoly of values? Surely there’s something un-American about that.
February 26th, 2010 | 8:40 pm
Mr. Goldman, several points
1. Many of the examples of distinct American political culture (as distinct from Wesetern Europe) that Lowry and Ponnuru cite are pre-Reaganite. This is especially true of American attitudes toward the state. These distinctions might be figments of the imagination, but they are not figments of conservative imagination. Richard Hofstadter might have written many of the same things when it came to the role of the state in America though with a different spirit.
2. I’m not sure what fraction of conservative thinkers find Woodrow Wilson to be holy. In the 1980s, George Will could compare Reagan to Wilson, mean it as high praise, and it seemd to cause little stir that I could tell. Now, thanks largely to the work of the Claremont folks and Jonah Goldberg, I think conservative writers are more likely to see Wilson as a German-inspired enemy of American exceptionalism. I think Wilson looms much larger in the imaginations of those on the Right who are much more suspicious of collective security arrangements and American military involvements than as an inspiration to the Lowrys and Ponnurus of the world.
3. Lowry’s and Ponnuru’s are of course only one way to define an Ameican exceptionalism. One could define it by an unwillingness o engage in collective security arrangements and international organizations outside of the Western Hemisphere, a far greater localism in our politics than we currently practice and other ways. Each of these might make us exceptional from the perspective of Western Europe, but each would also have to be defended on their merits.
4. Lowry and Ponnuru never asserted that the US represented the only significant values or that all meaningful values are lost to the outside world . I don’t take them to deny the value of hope, faith and charity or that the Pope lacks any of those. They seem to have asserted that there are certain distinct and desirable elments of American political culture that they would prefer to see preserved.
5. I don’t think that they argue that Obama is un-America, though no doubt other, cruder conservative writers will do just that. One can believe that certain distinct elements of American political culture are detrimental, seek to change them, and still be American, love the USA and be willing to die for one’s country. Jim Crow might be said to have made America distinct from Norway. We are certainly better off to not have Jim Crow and, in that one limited sense, be less distinct. It again comes down to the merts of the distinctions that Lowry and Ponnuru draw.
6. I don’t take their general defense of American political culture and their generally positive view of the effect of American foreign policy on the world to imply either a junkyard dog defense of every American foreign involvement or to deny that American domestic political culture might have tolerated significant injustices in the past (slavery) or the present (Ponnuru wrote a book on that). In that sense, the article certainly does not exclude the possibility that the US could both be doing wrong and being in the wrong. To the extent that it denies the idea of the America BEING wrong in the Howard Zinn sense, then damn right.
February 27th, 2010 | 10:00 am
[...] Review and Weekly Standard wings of the Republican Party. It is not enough — and I think Lowry and Ponnuru recognize this — for the United States to be possessed of a unique character in the world, or [...]
February 27th, 2010 | 11:35 am
[...] Samuel Goldman at PomoCon [...]
February 27th, 2010 | 11:55 am
Pete, thanks for your thoughtful comments. Your reading of the piece is more charitable than mine. I think you’re right to point out conservatives’ schizophrenia re: Wilson. The Goldberg types seem unable to understand the integral relation between the Wilsonian conception of foreign policy and the Wilsonian/corporatist conception of the domestic state. This was pointed by Robert Nisbet a long time ago.
I also appreciate the distinction between America being in the wrong and being wrong. I’m certainly not defending the Zinn/Chomsky view that America is exceptionally evil.
February 28th, 2010 | 12:54 pm
Mr. Goldman (or Samuel if that is not too bold), thank you for a civil reply to what might have been a dyspeptic comment by me. I think it is true that there is probably a linkage between Wilson’s domestic hyperactivity and foreign policy grandiosity, but I think it is very problematical to generalize from Wilson to other political actors and situations. There are, after all, many countries that combine fewer foreign policy responsibilities and a smaller military than the US but who have a more statist domestic politics.
There are mutliple points where the size of the US military and the scope and nature of US security commitments determine the statism of our domestic politics. Our current military, and the commitments that go with it, would, by itself, make a return to a Jeffersonian-type federal state impossible. But it doesn’t really preclude a return to Jeffersonian small government, because even the complete abandonment of American collective security arrangements and the slashing of the defense budget by any amount you might choose won’t bring about Jeffersonian small government and neither will anything else.
At the other extreme, a WWII-style mobilization would also call into being a much larger and more controlling domestic state. Let us pray (and for many reasons) that such a thing is both never again needed and never happens. But within the current parameters of American politics, the current size of the military and the scope of our security arrangements neither helps nor hinders either those who seek to expand the size and scope of the state, nor those who seek to limit the state. When it comes to controlling entitlement costs, reforming health care along either state-run or more free market lines, producing a more corporatist or competetive economy, or fostering a more or less technocratic political culture, abanonment of collective security (to either a smaller or greater degree) and cutting the military will not be central to the outcome of those struggles.
February 28th, 2010 | 2:47 pm
Maybe the article overstates the role of military interventionism Americanism; but it really only treats this as a corrolary of American exceptionalism. Their argument about what makes America exceptional, and the claim that Obama’s domestic agenda threatens this, is worth considering.
“American ideas are open to interpretation.” Certainly. However, they are also open to rejection, and Ponnuru and Lowry claim that Obama draws on a strand of thought that consciously and coherently rejects them. I don’t think P and L’s case rests on the idea that Obama is not a movement conservative. Many people who were not movement conservatives rejected, for instance, FDR’s court packing, Truman’s claims of Presidential power in the steel seizure case. Many people who are not movement conservatives, who recently were telling pollsters that they desired health care reform, and who would not mind tinkering with “our particular blend of public subsidy and private profit,” find themselves nevertheless strongly opposing Obamacare. These include some on the left who dislike the corporatism involved in the individual mandate.
February 28th, 2010 | 11:19 pm
[...] Samuel Goldman finds them imprecise: But the most serious problem is conceptual. Lowry and Ponnuru don’t distinguish between two ideas, one of which can be called American exceptionalism, the other American exclusivism. [...]
February 28th, 2010 | 11:42 pm
[...] Articles of Interest | 0 Comments` The PoMoCons have been taking on the exceptionalism piece. See Samuel Goldman’s piece here, and this from James Poulos: Arguing the merits of this case is important, but I’m more [...]
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